From the beginning of his career as a poet, William Butler Yeats made serious efforts to learn and master the complex and abstruse Indian religious-philosophical- artistic system and tried to learn Indian philosophy system which he could use in his poems and other works. But what he borrowed from his Indian sources depended upon what he liked at a particular phase of his career, and upon his own ideas of art during that phase. Whether he liked the ascetic aspects or the life-affirming aspects of Indian philosophy was decided by his temperament as well as his changing ideas of art. For example, in the early part of his life when he was so feeble and weak as to escape into unrealistic world, his interest in asceticism, contemplation and the search for truth was strengthened through his own reading and associating with Chatterji. In his middle phase of life, after meeting Tagore and reading his Gitanjali, he learned the Upanishadic idea of the self. In his later part of life when he affirmed and accepted life and this world as a natural condition, he met Shri Purohit Swami. Under the influence of Swami his ideas of art once again favored celebrating the supernatural, but simultaneously they were glorifying human passions. Sexuality and passion appeared to him aspects that could be sung about with intimacy. Instinct began to appear to him very sacred. He was turning to another phase of Indian philosophy which attributes sacredness to spontaneity. Yeats began to integrate the natural and the supernatural through his art so that his art becomes a new religion with spiritual overtones and with the warmth of the passions of life.
Unlike his early symbolic mode that is based on the natural representation of organic universe, Yeats’s later works are constructed in the allegorical mode which is based on the antinomies and oppositions that can be defined by rhetoric, form, tone and thematic motifs. If the antinomies are Yeats's central means of perceiving and interpreting the world, what kinds of experience are posited in the center of his life, and in what manner are those experiences represented? The aim of this essay is to approach, through his poetic sequence “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, Yeats’s frame of mind which perceives the world as a series of fixed set of antinomies. Yeats’s later lyric mode is connected, in a very complex manner, with the contradictions and conflicts which arise from what Michel Foucault calls “the absolute power of life and death” and “the life-administering power”. He believed that if the political power and the family authority were to be maintained in modern Ireland, he as poet should embody the ancient forms of power in the aesthetic domain. Such idea leads him to enact in his own works the oral tradition of ancient poetry. He thinks that, leaning on the model of ancient magical arts, modern lyric poet could embody the absolute power of death in his poetry. The literary mode which enacts such power and authority can function as one of the main agents that break the comedic power of modern individualism. Yeats’s idea of absolute power and authority is, however, in constant contradiction with the life-administering power of modern society. Therefore, despite the poet’s strong desire to enact the tragic authority of ancient bard, the poetic space of “Meditations in Time of Civil War” remains the complex site of contradictions and conflicts between the residual forms of Anglo-Irish traditional culture and the dominant cultural forms of modern individualism. It is a disruptive space in which what Fredric Jameson calls the “reversibility” and “disjunction” of modern literary text are embodied in thematic, figural and formal levels.
Yeats published the first edition of A Vision in 1925 and the revised edition in 1937. He had poured the most intense concentration of his intellect into it for 20 years. It may be regarded as the greatest of Yeats’s works, containing some of the most penetrating and beautiful prose that he wrote. It is essential to any understanding of many of his most notable poems and plays. But many critics agreed it was difficult to read and understand; it is extraordinarily distilled, yet complex in an extremely precise way. In this thesis I compared “Unity of Being” in Yeats’s A Vision with “Dao” in Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing. I interpreted the similarity between the theories of Yeats and Lao Zi. In A Vision Yeats explained 28 incarnations according to the 28 phases of the moon, the Great Wheel and the deliverance of the bond of rebirth. His major symbols are the gyres, the double triangle or the primary or objective and the antithetical or subjective. The Four Faculties(Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate) and the Four Principles(Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body) are related to the two contrasting tinctures. The antithetical gyre is lunar, aesthetic, expressive, multiple, hierarchial, aristocratic, artistic, particular, creative. The primary gyre is solar, moral, dogmatic unifying, humane, democratic, scientific, abstract. There is a state of perpetual conflit between the gyres and the moment of harmony of the gyres. The gyres are living each other’s death, dying each other's life. In Dao De Jing Lao Zi explained the dual character of the “Dao” operate as Being-Without-Form and Being-Within-Form, or Heaven and Earth, interrelated so closely the two sides of a coin. Yeats wanted to teach us what is the ultimate reality is and we can attain the “Unity of Being” at the moment of harmony of antinomies. The ultimate reality because neither one or many, concord nor discord, is symbolized as a phaseless sphere, but as all things fall into series of antinomies in human experience it becomes, the moment it is thought of, what he describe as the Thirteenth cone. Lao Zi insisted, “the world is oneness, or unity, emerging from the moment of the Dao.” Yeats also told us, “Eternity, though motionless itself, appears to be in motion.”
Crazy Jane is the name of the woman speaker in a sequence of poems which Yeats wrote in the years from 1929 to 1931, and are collected in “Words for Music Perhaps” section of The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Her words and deeds in the poems show that she is a very interesting and impressive woman. This paper is an attempt to understand this “crazy,” old, and wild woman, and to relate her to Yeats the poet and to Ireland. The first and introductory part of the paper begins by reading “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” the most famous poem of the Crazy Jane sequence. In Jane's talk with the bishop in this poem, not only in what she says, but also in the manner of her speech, we can quite clearly see what kind of person she is, and what kind of life she is living. Such understanding prepares us for the reading of the whole poems in the next part. Finding many of the poems difficult to understand, and interpretations of them different from critic to critic, the present writer tries to read the poems as closely as possible. Based upon the close reading of the poems in the second part, the third and last part of this paper considers some aspects of Crazy Jane’s personality and life, and their implications to Yeats and Ireland. First, the paper considers the possibility that Jane's free and bold expression of her sexual desire and love in the poems can be understood as the awareness and affirmation of feminine sexuality and love, and the critique of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. Next, this paper relates Crazy Jane to Yeats the poet and to Ireland, and discusses the ways in which she can be read as Yeats’s other self or mask, or as the image of Ireland.
The title of this essay seems to suggest the name of one particular philosophy in world history. When we speak of ‘stoicism,’ it is the name of universal philosophy that is a part of the education of every self-consciousness. While it is generally admitted that Yeats is a very great poet indeed, it is not easy enough to decide in what ‘greatness’ consists. At first, I wondered whether remained anything of to say about Yeats by the many aspects and contexts in which Yeats could be considered. I came to choose the topic-stoic stature and wisdom. I found myself that these two were so closely connected as to form one problem I must treat as a whole. Hegel's idea of thought is as follows, when I refer to thought, the stage of self-consciousness reaches here is the stage of thought. In other words, thought also means the liberty of self-consciousness. Thus freedom and will become identified. Stoic liberty represents this identity of thought and will. In the first place, I limit myself to the relationship between thought and will. Because Yeats who have toiled with language knows that the autonomy of the will confer the value that “hallows” human life. In the second throughout later poetry-especially, 「The Municipal Gallery Revisited」 Yeats’s society is a small community of autonomous spirits. In fact it is through the will to preserve the individual in the deed and make it meaningful. Based upon a mutual greatness and of a mutual glory, the later poems about persons attempts to create a community of autonomous individuals―“the individual who is a world.” Yeats’s humanity results in art. According to Eliot, ‘the wisdom is essential in making the poetry, and it is necessary to apprehend it as poetry in order to profit by it as wisdom.’ The wisdom of a great poet is concealed in his work. But it is through his discipline and stoic of the will and mind that Yeats could sing a song celebrating human endeavour.
Numbers have the physical and spiritual symbols by abstracting and emptying themselves. They develop from the fundamental elements into many animations, personalities, signs, emanations, and at last literary symbols. As a result, the poetical spirit or visions of Yeats in A Vision could be integrated in the numerical symbols of 1, 2, 3, 4, and their muliplications. The fundamental numbers seem to extend their symbolism into other multiplied numbers, especially 28 phases of the moon. Number One in his poetry frequently symbolizes the Causal Body, Origin, and Divine Basis. Number 2 signifies the duality, the harmony of concord and discord, or various opposing elements. Three reveals the uniting/solving process of conflicting duality. It insinuates the figurations of peace or harmony. Number 4 induces the peaceful world of the triangle-like Number 3 into the inner worlds of men. Yeats used to devide the human animations into 4 faculties. Number 4 is the reflection of the division of the Number 2(duality). From the basic numbers, all the poetic combinations can be implicated into the new, novel, personal symbols. His cosmological symbols and numerology in A Vision can be closely related to the Eastern world view and cosmological human nature. Especially, his poetic theory of “Unit of Being” doesn’t show the faculty of Number Zero, nothingness or stillness, or the Eastern emptiness. It rather show the state of fullness, fullness of Western Intellect. To understand how much the numerological conceptions are resolved into his poetry, we have explicated one of his poetry in A Vision.
Some critics have argued that William Butler Yeats and Irish Literary Revivalist defend nationalism in symbolic compensation in the form of mythologizing for the loss and trauma which result from the long history of the British colonial rule. Their focus has been the Celtic mythology and that of Mother Ireland. Other critics present their counter-argument by designating James Joyce as the precursor of the counter-movement which manifests the resistance against Yeatsian mythologizing among the exiled poets such as Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Thomas MacGeevy, including Joyce. Establishing such polarity in the approaches to modern and contemporary Irish poetry in this way will produce a problematic logic which causes a secondary binary opposition between extreme nationalism and abstract cosmopolitanism. In attempts to avoid a futile reconciliation of the two arguments, one needs to redefine or deconstruct the master or grand narratives concerning myth, nation, and nationalism. Also, one might feel it necessary to provide a persuasive discussion of the interrelationship between myth and nationalism. Recent theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Lia Greenfield, Homi Bhabham, and Eric Hobsbawm have provided persuasive theories about nationalism and beyond-nationalism. Critics such as Tom Garvin, Desmond Fennell, Marianne Elliott, Roy Foster, Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, and Luke Gibbons have investigated the potential methodology to overcome the logic of binary opposition concerning Irish nationalism from the self-reflective perspective. The common ground of these critics and theorists is based upon the definition of nationalism in terms of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined community” which is based upon the discursive anchors such as narrative, myth, and symbol. Irish national myth offers one of the most typical case study for this “imagined construction.” Using Richard Kearney’s term “post-nationalism,” the objective of this paper is to present a perspective of post-nationalism, and to demonstrate the polyphonic voices of modern and contemporary Irish poets, starting from Yeats and Joyce who have been approved among critics as the poets of the two mainstreams in 20th-century Irish poetry to those post-Yeatsian/Joycean poets such as Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Mahon, to name a few. My anchors of discussion are mythologizing, demythologizing, and remythologizing.
빅토리아적 가치가 새로운 현대적 경험의 현실 앞에서 무너져 내렸을 때 모더니스트 작가들은 개별적 방식―예술이나 스스로가 만든 종교 등―으로 자기의 새로운 느낌과 생각을 표현하게 된다. 대표적 모더니스트 중 하나인 예이츠도 추상적 과학과 소박한 신앙에 염증을 느끼고 문학적 소재를 이용하여 “새로운 종교, 거의 오류가 없는 시적 전통의 교회”를 세우게 된다. 그는 비전에서 고안하여 그의 예술적 창작의 원리로 삼은 자신의 상징 체계를 설립하는데, 그 기본 개념은 세상에 있는 모든 것은 개인이든, 역사든, 우주적 힘이든, 하나의 대립된 갈등 상을 보인다는 것이다. 이러한 체계의 극적 양상에 의해 그는 현대 세계에서의 인간 실존의 모순적 성격을 인식하고 이러한 인식을 통해 자기 스스로 해결점을 찾는다. 예이츠에게는 그의 삶이 또한 대조의 드라마였는데, 자신의 내면에서 대립에 의해 늘 분열된 채로 있으면서 모든 대립이 그의 예술 창작을 통해 조화로운 전체로 해결되는 상태를, 비록 성취할 수는 없어도, 추구해 온 때문이었다. 세상의 유전에 말린 한 사람으로서 예이츠는 “다 떨어진 외투”가 되는 것이 불가피하다는 점에서 실패자로 운명지어져 있었다. 하지만 시인으로서 그는 그의 예술적 삶에서 승리하였다. 대조의 드라마에 의해 그는 분열되고 갈등하는 현대 세계의 경험에 통일성을 부여할 수 있었다. 본고에서는 예이츠의 주요 단시 4편을 대상으로 하여 예술과 삶, 영과 육, 시간과 무시간, 실제와 이상 등 대립하는 갈등 상으로 드러나는 그의 모순적 비전에 대해 논의하였고, 빅토리아적 가치의 관점에서 보아 부조리하고, 무의미하고, 기껏해야 파편적으로 보이는 현대의 세계를 그 자신의 의미 있는 새로운 세계로 재구성한 것을 그의 모더니스트로서의 업적으로 보았다.